Mapping Hacks

Quite a few of Mapping Hacks’ friends and contributors are on the speaker list at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference this year. When this year’s Where was first announced, I was uninspired by the strapline, “Where’s the Value?”; the ORA organisers have since done a fair bit to change the tone, and re-emphasise open source and open data projects. But the conference outline is very much heading in two directions at once. Is “hacksploitation” really helpful to those people busting a gut to make better own maps and models of the world around them, for the love rather than for the bottom line?

Is resistance futile? Is Where 2.0 the inevitable future of the geospatial web, aggregated into the hands of a few massive data+service providers? It this something that “grassroots” projects should be celebrating as a successful acknowledgement of the last few years’ worth of effort? The Where outline promises that “We’ll learn how the established geo industry is reacting to the first businesses making money from their grassroots geospatial projects.”

If I thought I had the answers, I’d put them on a postcard. (And am feeling increasingly tempted to attend this year, just to find out more about what other people see as the future.)

Posted in events |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.